JOE AARON: It's sort of nice to go back

We drove through the twisting canyon with the mountains climbing steeply away on each side of it, then came around a sweeping curve in the highway.

"Well," I said unnecessarily to Bernice, "there she is. That's the mighty metropolis of Albuquerque in the fair state of New Mexico."

And I had, briefly, come back home -- back to the city that was once a mighty adventure, filled with all manner of wild and unlikely promises.

There was a time -- and it was not so many years ago, really -- when Albuquerque was to me the most exciting city on earth, and in those days I knew it well, from the mountains to the mesas that frame it on the east and west. I walked its ancient streets endlessly then, and explored its picturesque shops, and strolled its seedy skid row, and absorbed the feeling of the town into my bones.

I had gone to college there, living on sardines that I bought on sale and sustained by the certain knowledge that, one day, I was going to set the world on fire.

I no longer eat sardines, because I can't stand the glurpy things, and arson no longer is in my soul. I scribble birdshot essays now and warm myself at somebody else's fire.

But it's sort of nice, in a way that is vaguely sad, to go back for a little while as a guide for someone who's not been there before and point out the locale of past glories.

"This is all new out here," I told Bernice, pointing to the gas stations and curio shops and motels and gaudy restaurants that push into the foothills of the Sandias. "This was all rangeland when I was here."

And the landmarks that I had known are now hard to find. The main intersections that once seemed so enormous to a boy fresh from the farm are just ordinary streets. The fancy businesses of a generation ago have shrunk and faded somehow, and new and larger ones have sprung up to confuse me.

I couldn't even find Baca's -- and it was Bernice, not I, who saw it first. It was on the opposite side of the street from where my memory said it was. And now it is big and plush, with heavy, ornate wooden doors and tiny peephole windows. The windows I remember were as big as billboards.

And once, ah yes, once I could have found Baca's blindfolded, just by the aroma of the tacos served there, and the fiery enchiladas, and the refritos, and flour tortillas almost as large as pillow cases. I've not found finer eating since and likely never will.

We neared the university campus and I could feel a subtle excitement as we eased onto Central Avenue.

"There's the journalism building -- right over there," I said, slowing the car and pointing.

Bernice seemed able, oddly enough, to take it all in stride. But then she has never heard Professor Rafferty lecture, nor absorbed the very FEEL of newspaper work within those walls, nor been assigned to cover a two-bit campus occurence that seemed that day to be the most important story in the world.

It was Journalism with a capital "J" in those days, back when we drove up on the west mesa late at night, and drank beer, and made impassioned defenses of Freedom of the Press.